{ Woman eats entire cutlery set | Thanks Kaleigh }

related { Pica is the craving or ingestion of nonfood items. The cravings found in patients diagnosed with pica may be associated with a nutritional deficiency state, such as iron-deficiency anemia; with pregnancy; or with mental retardation or mental illness. The word pica is derived from the Latin word for magpie, a species of bird that feeds on whatever it encounters. | Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders }

{ My primary interest in visiting your Web site is to examine every page on the site before I finally find your hours of operation and phone number in illegible type in a graphical footer. | neversaidaboutrestaurantwebsites.tumblr.com | more }

Cannibalism is part of the great cultural legacies of our species. In times past, for instance, we would eat our honoured dead to gain their wisdom.

In medieval times, it was believed that memories were stored in the cerebrospinal fluid. Sadly, it seems that memory cannot be transferred biochemically. (…)

In the Polynesian islands, human meat has always been known as “long pig,” because people taste like pork.

{ Warren Ellis/Wired | Continue reading }

“Rocks or up?”

“Up, please.”

(…)

“In addition, most educated drinkers agree rye whiskey gives more complexity to the finished cocktail than bourbon. Since you’re obviously a little new to all this, let’s start you off with a Kentucky rye that’s been aged in Madeira cask and contains thirty percent corn…”

{ The Threepenny Review | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2. Weegee }

It is not surprising that theologians and artists clashed over the Last Supper. Common meals were the center of social life in Renaissance Europe, everywhere from ascetic, remote monasteries to bankers’ and cardinals’ lush gardens in the middle of Trastevere. And they were always a battleground of opposing ideals of austerity and consumption. (…)

But what should a Last Supper look like? What did Christ and the Apostles eat? And how much? When Jesus distributed pieces of bread, was it leavened or unleavened? What other foodstuffs had been on the table? Did the followers of Jesus eat lamb, as Jews normally did at Passover? Over the centuries—as an article in the International Journal of Obesity recently showed—artists made many different choices. Sometimes they put lamb on the table. But they also served fish, beef, and even pork in portions that grew over the centuries.

{ Cabinet | Continue reading }

painting { Dirck van Baburen, Roman Charity, Cimon and Peres, ca. 1623 }

{ Patricia Piccinini }

unrelated { San Francisco bans Happy Meals. The city’s board of supervisors votes to forbid restaurants from giving away toys with meals that have high levels of calories, sugar and fat. | LA Times | full story }

Is it OK to boil a lobster? (…)


Let’s consider the life, or rather the death, of a lobster. In nature lobsters begin very small and die a million horrible deaths in a million horrible ways. As they get older the death rate drops. We have ample evidence that lobsters do not go gentle into that good night, dying peacefully in their sleep at a ripe old age. Instead, once mature, a lobster that doesn’t go into the pot might face off with cod, flounder, an eel or two, or one of many diseases.

Considering that one of the natural deaths a lobster may face is to be torn limb from limb by an eel, getting tossed into a pot of boiling water doesn’t seem quite so gruesome. But there is a big difference between death by eel and death by human, the eel is not human. And now we have hit upon the broader question that must be answered before we can understand the short answer given above: Are humans a part of nature, or apart from nature?

{ The Science Creative Quaterly | Continue reading }

photo { Bill Owens }

According to Slashdot and some awesome guy named Big Alan (AKA Alan Hirsch):

… the key to a man’s heart, and other parts, is pumpkin pie. Out of the 40 odors tested in Hirsch’s study, a mixture of lavender and pumpkin pie got the biggest rise out of men ages 18 to 64. That particular fragrance was found to increase penile blood flow by an average of 40%. “Maybe the odors acted to reduce anxiety. By reducing anxiety, it acted to remove inhibitions,” said Hirsch.

{ OmniBrain/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Young Kyu Yoo }

The taste of the food and drinks that you serve your guests may impact their moral judgments of you in more ways than one. (…)

The results showed that taste perception significantly affected the study participants’ moral judgments — physical disgust, induced by a bitter taste, elicited feelings of moral disgust. This effect was more pronounced in participants with politically conservative views than in participants with liberal views. Taken together, these findings suggest that embodied gustatory experiences may impact moral processing more than previously thought.

{ APS | Continue reading }

{ Celebrate Thanksgiving with vegetarian and vegan dishes from some of your favorite chefs and cookbook authors | all the recipes }

related { The Social Cognition of Your Thanksgiving Dinner | Thanksgiving links }

Eighty per cent of adults in the US and the UK are moderate users of the psychoactive drug, caffeine.

Of all the effects it has on our minds—enhanced attention, vigilance and cognition—perhaps least known is its tendency to make us more susceptible to persuasion.

This was demonstrated in a study by Pearl Martin and colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia (Martin et al., 2005). In their experiment they tried to convince participants to change their minds about the controversial issue of voluntary euthanasia.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

photo { Charles Brittin, Arrest at Los Angeles Federal Building Protest, 1965 }

The whole point of Halloween for kids these days is taking candy from strangers. Of course, that’s just what we are never supposed to do. (…)

And how many children have been harmed by randomly poisoned trick-or-treat candy? Approximately zero. (…) One California dentist in 1959 did pass out candy-coated laxatives, and some kids got bad stomachaches. But instances over the past 40 years where children were allegedly harmed by tainted candy have invariably fallen apart under scrutiny.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

photo { Morad Bouchakour }

{ Andrew Hetherington }

Is it OK to cook with extra-virgin olive oil?

One of the main things to consider when evaluating whether it is OK to heat extra-virgin olive oil (or any other oil for that matter) is the smoke point of the oil. The smoke point is the temperature at which visible gaseous vapor from the heating of oil becomes evident. It is traditionally used as a marker for when decomposition of oil begins to take place. Since decomposition incurs chemical changes that may not only result in reduced flavor and nutritional value but also the generation of harmful cancer causing compounds (oxygen radicals) that are harmful to your health, it is important to not heat oil past its smoke point. Inhaling the vapors can also be damaging.

{ WH Foods | Continue reading }

The Return of the Three-Martini Lunch

If you have a mixologist making complicated drinks from esoteric-sounding ingredients, people don’t even feel guilty that they’re drinking. Jon Kamen, chairman and CEO of New York-based production company @radical.media, doesn’t. He only goes out to lunch once a week, but when he does, he often goes to EN Japanese Brasserie and orders a drink, such as their combination of Japanese liquor shochu and oolong tea. “They’ve created certain cocktails that I don’t look at as a drink so much as a complement to the meal I’m having,” he says.

{ Businessweek | Continue reading }

photo { Sarah Lucas }

Losing weight can be described at its simplest as a matter of counting calories during the daytime. Consume fewer calories and burn more through activity and exercise, and you’re likely to lose weight. Eat more high-calorie foods and sit on the couch all day watching football, and you get the opposite effect. But according to a new study from University of Chicago Medical Center researchers, another number should be taken into account by dieters: hours of sleep. (…)

“If your goal is to lose fat, skipping sleep is like poking sticks in your bicycle wheels,” Penev said. “Cutting back on sleep, a behavior that is ubiquitous in modern society, appears to compromise efforts to lose fat through dieting. In our study it reduced fat loss by 55 percent.”

{ University of Chicago Medical Center | Continue reading }

artwork { Left: Robert Blake | Right: Katie Rhody | Nosh: Food Art Show curated by Kady Grant and Anthony Iacono, Opening Friday, October 8th, 7-10pm | Culture Fix, NYC }

Atkins-style low-carbohydrate diets help people lose weight, but people who simply replace the bread and pasta with calories from animal protein and animal fat may face an increased risk of early death from cancer and heart disease, a new study reports.

The study found that the death rate among people who adhered most closely to a low-carb regimen was 12 percent higher over about two decades than with those who consumed diets higher in carbohydrates.

But death rates varied, depending on the sources of protein and fat used to displace carbohydrates.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Helmut Newton }

related { Every five years the federal government updates its dietary guidelines for Americans. This year, with most Americans overweight or obese and at risk of high blood pressure, policymakers are working to reinvent the familiar food pyramid and develop advice that is simple and blunt enough to help turn the tide. | Washington Post | Continue reading }

We are used to thinking of culture as a social factor and not a biological factor. We attribute dispositions such as being individualistic or being collectivist to the country that one was brought up in, but no one has really looked into why certain cultures tend to be that way. An emerging field of research called cultural neuroscience says that cultural values can be shaped by the brain and genes.

For example, in one striking example I read about quite recently, one hypothesis put forth for the reason why Asian people like spicy food was because spices conferred natural bacteria killing properties that was especially important in a humid climate where food went bad. Over time, the hypothesis goes, people who liked spicy food more and ate more spicy food were less prone to stomach diseases that killed the others, thus passing on their genes for the next generation. A similar finding was found when examining lactose intolerance. Lactose intolerance is far more prevalent in certain regions of Asia where the rearing of lifestock for milk is less common. In Europe however, up to 95% are able to digest lactose, and this is reflected in their preference for milk products like cream and cheese.

{ Psychothalamus | Continue reading }

related { Chillies burn our tongues, make our eyes water and bring us out in a sweat. A developmental psychologist looks at a peculiarly human form of masochism | The Guardian | full story }

photo { Molly Schiot }

Consider the orange. Citrus sinensis. Its fleshy, segmented fruit has a tight-fitting skin and contains at least 300 different chemicals. It is not easy to grow. It takes about 13 gallons of water. The fruit only ripens on the tree before it’s picked. And since they’re only grown in six states, oranges are either packed and shipped to places where citrus doesn’t grow or processed into one of America’s favorite breakfast drinks: orange juice. (…)

Lahousse charted the 10 key components of an orange in a sunburst diagram. Each color stands for a key flavor component and using the right combination of other ingredients, one could create the taste of an orange without actually using an orange.

{ Good magazine | Continue reading }

artwork { Mark Rothko, Orange and Yellow, 1956 }